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Thursday, October 16, 2008

Happened to see this article on Digg this morning. Its an article from dailymail.co.uk about what space smells like. Sounds weird, doesn't it? Turns out it's a legitimate question, as astronauts often notice particular smells of space as they take off their helmets inside the space station. Some of these include the smell of steak and hot metal. Check out the article here.

I didn't connect it before, but the smells described by the astronauts, grilled steak and molten metal, makes sense when you consider that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are found throughout the interstellar medium, are mostly made up of soot, like that on a BBQ grill or at a steel mill.

That's my point, but it would it would still be true, were the ISS anywhere in our solar system, as opposed to halfway to the Magellanic Cloud galaxy, or deep space, which is the vast majority used for averaging ppm.

I know this post is old, but I heard somewhere that someone said it smelled like burnt cookies. The astronauts smell it the most after a space walk, when he astronauts first open the airlock to let them back in.